Tinseltown A 100-year Journey Down Reality Lane In The City Of

Dreams

February 01, 1987|By Merrill Shindler, Special to The Tribune.

In Hollywood terms, Hollywood is a High Concept. A High Concept is a movie idea in which the packaging is the most important element of all. This is because what`s found inside the packaging is usually so thin, so pallid, you`d be hard-pressed to built a 10-minute short around it.

But construct a package around the peanut-sized central idea, a package made out of a high-tech soundtrack, lots of spinoff music videos, a fair number of glitzy stars and tons of special effects, and shazam! Not only do you have a High Concept Film, you`ve got, more often than not, a major box-office hit. ``Rocky IV`` was High Concept. ``The Golden Child`` was Very High Concept. But it`s Hollywood itself, observing its 100th anniversary today, that is probably the Highest Concept of them all--a city of glitz and glamor, wrapped around a reality that`s thinner than your average victim of the multitudinous plagues of aerobics, sushi and spa cuisine, icons of Hollywood`s rock-steady belief that you can neither be too thin, nor too rich.

Oscar Levant once said, ``Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel.`` He wasn`t alone as a grumbler about Hollywood as a somewhat demented state of mind. Comedian Fred Allen observed that ``Hollywood is a great place if you`re an orange.`` What`s funny is that there aren`t any oranges growing any more in Hollywood, except for the occasional smog-benighted citrus tree in a stagehand`s back yard.

And there weren`t any oranges growing here when Hollywood was first founded a century ago. Unlike much of southern California, Hollywood wasn`t a massive orange grove. When it was created by real estate developer Horace Wilcox 100 years ago, it was nothing but several square miles of treeless hills and weed-infested fields. It was land in need of having a High Concept constructed around it. And in time, Hollywood became the most dream-filled High Concept the world has ever known.

In his novel ``The Last Tycoon,`` F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was seduced by the allure of Hollywood like so many before, and so many after, wrote: ``You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for things that we don`t understand. It can be understood, too, but only dimly, and in flashes.`` To come to any understanding of Hollywood, one must go back to the beginning, long before there was any tinsel to be found in Tinseltown.

Ironically, Hollywood began as a town where glamor was completely unknown, even avoided. It was founded by Prohibitionist Horace Wilcox and his wife Daeida on Feb. 1, 1887. It was one of 60 town sites filed during that great boom year, a year when a slogan emanated from southern California across the nation: ``Buy land in southern California and wear diamonds.``

The town wasn`t named after anything even vaguely resembling a forest of holly bushes. Instead, Daeida Wilcox was intrigued by the name of a summer home outside Chicago owned by a woman she met on the train on her way to California--a summer house named ``Hollywood.`` It was Wilcox`s intention to found a community in which liquor was unknown. And until the 1910s, that`s exactly what he accomplished.

By the mid-1890s, settlers were beginning to plant the barren Hollywood hills with orange and lemon trees. In 1903, Hollywood was incorporated into a city. In 1910, it became part of Los Angeles proper. And then, in 1911, the first movie studio opened. Life in Hollywood was never the same.

The first films were made inside an abandoned roadhouse at the corner of Sunset and Gower, a tavern that had been closed by the local Prohibitionists. It was the Nestor Film Co., which took over the roadhouse, paying the owners $40 a month for its use.

Nestor (which also was known as Centaur Films) actually wound up in Hollywood as something of a coincidence. The company had been making westerns for several years in New Jersey, where, with some difficulty, they`d simulate a landscape of sagebrush and mesas. The company`s director wanted to move to California; the company`s owner wanted to move to Florida. They both agreed to abide by the decision of a heads-or-tails coin toss. Obviously, California won.

Word traveled quickly in the fledgling film industry. In 1910, the population of Hollywood, mostly agricultural, was 5,000. By 1919, it was 35,000, mostly involved with the movie business. By 1925, when films were in full swing, the population of Hollywood had grown to 130,000, with nary an orange grove left standing. Land values jumped from $700 an acre to $10,000 for that same land.